


The I in Team

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Eventual Romance, F/M, Movie: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-13 17:33:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16022657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Sensing their discord, Skinner sends Mulder and Scully to a team-building seminar (set in late season 6).





	1. Distance

 

On his desk were two folders: his and hers. Enclosed, a set of plane tickets to and from plus an itinerary and a slick magazine-like brochure for the program. In front of him the two agents squirmed, backs too straight, body language askew, adrift. They were out of sync, chugging along like an engine with a blown cylinder. Their agitation was not the resigned chagrin he’d expected, but a genuine panic at the thought of being sent away together, at the thought of being told to think like a team again.

He cleared his throat and slid the folders forward. “This isn’t a request, it’s a requirement. And I don’t expect you to be distracted by mutants or conspiracies or four-hundred-year-old mothmen, either. You will attend the seminar and participate.”  _And you will come back like the agents I know_ , he wanted to say. He watched them fidget uncomfortably, these two who had been this way for months. They’d been misaligned somehow, and he wasn’t quite sure how to straighten things out. Their stint undercover had been a failure. Had, in fact, seemed to make things worse, and the work that followed only drove the wedge deeper.

Mulder leaned forward and took his folder. “Anything else?”

Skinner shook his head, jaw locked tight, and watched Mulder walk out the door. Scully lifted her own folder and stood to leave.

“Agent Scully,” he said, and she stopped. “Dana,” his voice softer now, “off the record… is everything okay?”

She paused a moment and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “It’s…” she took a deep breath. “Fine. It’s fine.”

And she walked out the door.

—

Things were, of course, not fine.

Here was a desk, reclaimed by its rightful owner. Here was an “area” where she sat with the other unwanted things. Here was the phone where he’d whispered quiet words she couldn’t hear. Here was the trashcan where she’d thrown away her lunch, once she’d realized who he was talking to. Here was his betrayal, sitting on her chest like a mound of stones. All these objects filled the room so heavily, there was no space for argument, hardly any air to breathe. She played her part, no spark left in her eye. She watched him tolerate her presence. She watched him sneak off to fuck another true believer.

She wanted to say  _how dare you, with HER?_  But she feared he would say  _you have no right_ , and this would ram home the spike in her heart. She wanted to say  _how dare you not love me?_  But she feared he would say  _but I do—like a sister, like a friend, like the best partner I’ve ever had_. She wanted to scream that she’d stripped herself to the bone for him, lost everything for him, lit her whole future aflame for him. But she feared he would say,  _this is the work; you knew the risks_ , and he would be right. He was right.

She had failed only herself in thinking he were different.

Stocking-toes on her bedroom rug, she packed the wrong things into her duffel.  _Wear casual attire for hiking and lots of movement!_ the brochure demanded, but this was all wrong because how could she face him without her armor? How could she stand so short before him, in sneakers and leggings and her FBI tee? He would, she would, they both would remember that first case together when she brought no baggage, no unrequited love, only fresh-faced optimism, when she laughed with him as if a whole beautiful life still lay ahead of her. How could she call up that memory now, when she saw the world for what it was?

She catalogued each item, counted pairs of underwear and soft cotton bras, a bathing suit, running shoes, a vibrator. She held tight to modest comforts these days, small pleasures she dealt herself alone. Nights after dark, knees tented beneath a loose blanket, she revenge-fucked him in her mind with a pocket rocket between her legs. She’d come three, sometimes four times, imagining his fingers and mouth, knowing he didn’t love her. It was a punishment and a release, an outlet for her shame, meager vengeance against his treachery. If only she had more free time, she thought, maybe she’d fuck strangers, too. She’d be damned if she’d give up this paltry relief on this hellish trip to the land of furniture towers and smiling corporate psychologists. Nor would she give up her armor for one minute longer than she had to.

At the airport, Scully strolled up to the departure gate in heels and her smart black suit. She dropped her bag beside his boots on the scuffed linoleum and sat with her knees tilted away from him.

“You ready for this?” he asked. He wore jeans and an oatmeal colored sweater, sleeves pushed up to the elbows. She hated him, just a little, for looking so good.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She pulled a paperback from the side pouch of her bag, fingering the receipt-cum-bookmark without making eye contact.

“Scully—” he began, but was cut off by an announcement: a different flight, not theirs. He watched her ankle, the precise cut of her heel, bouncing against her bag over her crossed knee. There were miles between them: oceans, mountains, fields of unspoken terrain. She seemed angry at him all the time, now. If not angry, sad. Her inscrutability frustrated him even as it made him ache—he knew he was the cause. He knew she was disappointed in him, that she wanted more from him. He was angered by her expectations. He was angered by himself.

The mismatched pair was swallowed by the anonymity of the airport space: the muffled squawk of departure announcements and passenger names; the clatter of tardy feet running to gates; the mingled, vaguely nauseating smells of a dozen types of take-out; the impersonal smiles of staff, taking tickets and eyeing clocks. The space absorbed their conflicts, their grudges, their dread of this trip into the noplace notime of the endless terminal. When their flight was called, they queued up and boarded without word or glance. No one around them even imagined they knew each other.

—

McMurdo Station  
Antarctica  
August, 1998

They are quite literally frozen together when rescue finally comes. Inside the station, staff defrost them, their cold bodies coming apart with reluctance to be wrapped in thermal blankets. A doctor treats their frostbite, their mild hypothermia, pushes them together into a warm tub where their limbs remain entangled out of need for warmth and each other. After, they stay this way, pressed together in waffle-weave cotton, her cold hands under his fingers, held against his belly skin that is finally warm. They collapse onto a bed this way, heated by soup and tea, barely dressed, bound by a heap of blankets. They sleep.

Some hours later, or perhaps days, he feels her lips against his chest, her toes on his shin, her fingers still splayed against his abdomen, and something stirs in him. He recalls his visceral need of her, the peachskin feel of her cheek under his palm, wet eyes watching his with such trust, such hope, such relief that he needs her. He needs her. He recalls his declarations to her, how he wanted to offer her a chaste kiss, just to remind her how much she meant, but how with every millimeter he lowered his lips, more chasteness slipped away, replaced by something deeper, something dark from the churning, pumping bottom of his gut, some primal heartbeat pressing his lips forward while his brain tried to say  _Friend. Partner._

Now here at the frozen asshole of the planet where time stands still again and he feels her whole body on his, feels her stretch and senses her eyes blinking open in the heavy shadows, that low rumbling returns. It directs his fingers to her back, makes small circles there under the oversized tee she’s borrowed from his bag. They are just bodies, he thinks. They are nowhere, he thinks. They are no one, down here in this dark, frozen place outside of time.

What they could be here is anything, is not them, is two figures scraped back from the edge of death and disassociated from their lives. They nearly fell off the end of the earth, out of the world, where they would have been lost to history. And so here is an excess, a gift of separation from who they are. He tells himself this is why. He tells himself it is an action without ground, without the ripple of consequence, when he kisses her here, when they rut against each other in the so very dark of a land without sunshine, under a pile of strangers’ blankets.

He doesn’t say her name, won’t even let it form in his mind, nor anywhere near his lips. She gasps against him, presses her breasts against his skin, comes alive and wet and wanting, jamming the crotch of her too-big sweatpants against his aching cock. She pulls his fingers into the soft jersey cotton, against the stiff curls of her pubic hair, into the unfathomable wetness of her need for him, and she whimpers. They fuck like the only two people on earth: like lonely strangers, like the best of friends, like nameless creatures grasping at life when the sun has gone out. He tells himself it is not them, but other words gurgle in his throat when he comes. He strangles them back, swallows them and they burn like fire:  _I love you_ , he doesn’t say.

The fire sits in his gut. It burns him alive. He holds her at arm’s length, afraid of his incinerating touch and her soft skin that feels too much like kindling. By the time they arrive back in Washington, they have both gone cold.


	2. Assessment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What are your strengths and weaknesses as a team?

“Now I want you to be honest. This may feel like a lot of writing up front, but I promise you it will pay off. Think about what you’ve experienced together, what you’ve accomplished, and what you want from the future.”

The man’s name was Mark and looked exactly the way Mulder had expected: khaki shorts and a lavender t-shirt, sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, his mouth full of too-white teeth. He held a dry-erase marker in one hand as he watched the teams scribble into their comb-bound worksheet packets.

Scully was writing diligently, careful script tumbling out into every blank space. Mulder looked at his own booklet, but the words, the questions, floated up like foreign symbols. He was drowning in white space, his pencil poised but refusing to cooperate.

_\- What do you appreciate about your team mates?_  
\- What are their strengths?   
\- What are your strengths together?  
\- What are your weaknesses as a team?  
\- What opportunities do you see for improvement and growth in the future?  
\- What challenges have you faced in the past and how did you face them?  
\- What challenges do you foresee in the future?

How in the fuck was she answering these questions so easily? And more importantly, what the fuck was she writing about him? After the awkward continental breakfast and Welcome Lecture, they’d delved into this “teamwork assessment,” designed to help them talk through their current position, then to discover their goals. The room was distracting with its ugly fluorescent lights and uncomfortable plastic chairs.  _She_  was distracting in her stretchy pants and t-shirt, looking like she were ready for her first day at the Academy. Who was this woman? Where had she been hiding? She looked soft and vulnerable and real in a way he hadn’t seen since… well. It was unnerving.

The problem was that he didn’t know how to write anything about her, this mysterious woman who’d locked herself up tight in the months since Antarctica. These questions were precisely the kinds of things he tried to keep out of his mind most days. Dramatic outpourings aside, he wasn’t usually one to talk out his feelings or relationships, even his professional ones. He couldn’t exactly write, “makes me a whole person” under what he appreciates. He wasn’t even sure if it were true anymore—wasn’t sure if he was a person at all, really.

He thought about being flip, writing smartass ironic answers, keeping his real thoughts as far away as possible from this paper. Then he thought of how she’d look at him: how she’d dip her head in frustration, bite her lips together in disappointment, shrink back from him across the ever-widening glacier of hurt. He thought about how hurting her was really just another way of hurting himself. Would that be worse, he wondered, than having to answer honestly? He was running out of time. Fuck it, he thought, bringing his pencil down to the paper at last. Things couldn’t get much worse, could they?

—

They could. Of course they could.

Scully stared down at her booklet, fingering the slope of her own letters on the page. Chatter from the other teams and partners filled the room, encircling their own balloon of painful silence. She refused to speak for a full two minutes before slowly, slowly lifting her head to look at him.

“Is that all?” she asked, voice like the flat hum of a machine.

Mulder cleared his throat. “Ah… yeah. That’s, um, that’s what I wrote.” His eyes kept flicking over her ink-covered page, so curious.

She nodded. She closed her book.

“Aren’t you going to read yours?”

It was sharing time. Honesty time. Time to really dig in to who they were as a team before the first small-group meeting, where a “professional” would assess their assessments. He was looking at the other teams, their embarrassed smiles and nervous-but-open body language as they spoke or listened, as they played along, as they gave compliments and took criticism as well as they could. Here was Scully, locked up like a safe, cold as permafrost. She opened her mouth to try and speak, and he caught sight of some expression there, something deep and wounded in the hesitation on her lips, a moment of profound vulnerability in her eyes, and he was struck. Here was his Scully.  _His_  Scully, who’d poured her heart out in her notes while he’d… done what he’d done. She was trying, at least, while he was doing what, exactly?

“No,” she said finally. “No, Mulder, I’m not.”

He looked down at his paper again where he’d scrawled a handful of incomplete phrases and oversimplified platitudes. “Scully, I—”

“Dana! Fox!” They were interrupted by Sharon, the coordinator who would their small group sessions. “How are you guys getting along? I saw things looked a little quiet over here.”

“We’re fine,” Scully said.

“Really?” Her look was genuine, concern with a dash of disbelief. “Have you come up with some answers in common? Some areas where you don’t agree? Where you could communicate a little better?”

At this, Scully huffed out a laugh. Sharon frowned.

“I had a little trouble,” Mulder clarified. “I don’t think I gave the questions the kind of attention I should have.”

Here was a small olive branch. Here was one answer that was true.

“Hmm,” Sharon said, eyeing the chilly distance between their chairs. “Maybe we should talk through just one of the questions? Would that be okay?”

Scully’s arms were folded across her chest and she was pursing her lips. Barely holding it together, he saw. She wanted to run and he didn’t blame her.

He nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

Scully looked at him, then at Sharon. “Alright,” she said.

Sharon nodded. “Good.” She’d pulled up a chair so they sat in a small triangle. “Let’s start with the positives. Dana, what did you write that you appreciate about Fox?”

“I—oh. Okay.” Scully opened her booklet again and breathed deeply before reading. “Um, I appreciate that you don’t ever give up. That you listen to those who everyone else has dismissed. That you never take anything at face value. That you’re good—” she swallowed to cover a break in her voice, “good with kids, with people who are lost and broken. That you’ve never made me feel weak, even when I was. And that you, um, you make me challenge what I think I know. Every day.” Her eyes remained hard on the page, too afraid to look up, too afraid he’d be smirking or smiling.

But he wasn’t. He was holding his eyes closed in shame, as if he’d been smacked. He felt himself coming apart, just a little bit; felt his anger at himself rising. These kind words from her, spat out affectless, thrown at him like weapons. She’d been right not to read aloud her answers. He didn’t deserve them.

“Wow, Dana,” Sharon said. “I can see how honest you’re being here, and those are really thoughtful responses. Fox, what did you write that you appreciate about Dana?”

He was caught in headlights. He was naked in front of the classroom. “See, I didn’t—”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. What did you write?”

“I wrote that, ah… that I appreciate how she puts up with my bullshit.”

Sharon smiled a little at this. “Okay, good,” she said. “That’s a start. I know you said you could do better, so let’s push this a little further. Do you see how your answer is focused on you, not on Dana? What are some things that she does, that are intrinsic to her as a person, that you appreciate?”

Scully was, of course, looking away, pretending not to listen, focusing on the jovial banter of the rest of the room. This was fucking torture. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t just say these things, for Christ’s sake. Not in this poorly lit room where the carpet smelled like formaldehyde and the walls were covered in banal motivational posters and the staff wore khaki shorts and too-big smiles and insisted they all use first names. This was not the place for these kinds of words.

“Fox?”

“Yeah. Um. I appreciate that she, that you… I like that you’re so focused. And that you’re a good shot. And that you listen.” He was doing this all wrong. “I’m sorry, I just…”

“It’s okay,” Sharon said. “We’re going to break into small groups soon, and we’ll work on it more then.” She patted him on the shoulder and he felt like a child. She moved to another group, and Mulder and Scully were alone again in this room full of people. He tapped his eraser against his workbook, thought about erasing the page, thought about erasing himself. He couldn’t imagine a more uncomfortable, miserable way to spend a Saturday.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She watched him, and he could see her thinking. She was parsing this situation logically, categorizing and analyzing his flimsy responses. “Mulder, do you even want to be my partner anymore?” she asked.

He was momentarily dazed. “What?”

She’d closed her book again and placed it back in her tote bag. “If you don’t, it would be good to tell me. If this isn’t something we can salvage…” She shook her head. “I know you hate these things. I just thought we could save ourselves the headache if you would just… put it out there.”

“No! Scully, what?”

She was collecting thoughts again when the organizers called time and began rounding them up for the small-group sessions. They sat at either ends of the Trust Circle for the whole session, squirming, avoiding eye contact. Neither of them said more than a handful of words the whole hour, and then they broke for lunch.

He ate alone, thinking, playing back over the morning, over the past weeks, the past year, six years: what they’d seen, what they’d lost. He tried to put himself in her position, tried to see himself through her eyes.

After lunch was a group activity, something about a balance-ring and assessing their ability to follow directions, to share responsibilities. He came with his workbook where he’d crammed a thousand words, filled every inch of the page with what he appreciated and how good they were at facing challenges and how all their weaknesses as a team were really just his. He watched the door, ready to hand her the book, to tell her he was sorry, to try again.

But she never showed.

—

Washington, D.C.  
September, 1998

They give and they take away, the powers and fates that govern his life. For a moment he hopes: the office renovated, the files reopened—surely for him, he thinks. Then he watches his whole life given over into the hands of an ex-lover and an enemy. Scully deceives herself, and in doing so, hurts him too. He cannot even make her believe. He blames her. He knows it is not her fault. He blames her.

He is alone on this, he tells himself. He is alone.

Scully brings him proof. She comes through as she always does, backs him up, works for it while he makes leaps over no ground. He wants to tell her he is sorry, but she is already gone: out the door in her black suit and a spike through her chest that he put there. He told her he couldn’t trust her. He fucking told her he couldn’t trust her. He’s ruined it all. He is alone.

But then Diana calls him. She offers him access. She tells him he’s never been alone, that she’s always been watching out for him. He finds her in the old office that still smells of poisonous fire, of paint and books and shelves and metal and glass and his whole goddamned life all toxically aflame. Diana pulls him into the corner and shows him her notes. He’s reading and then she’s kissing him. He lets it happen. After, he hates himself a little more.

But when he dreams, it is always Scully. Her small body tucked against his, her mouth hot on his, her bunched sweatpants shoved down around her ankles as she presses herself into his hand, onto his cock. He aches with it, even once comes in his sleep like he hasn’t since he was a teenager. When he dreams, her eyes are so blue and wide and wet and she whispers “Mulder,” and sometimes she fucks him, and sometimes she’s yanked away, out of his arms, into the belly of a great flying machine. Sometimes she’s frozen dead in the snow, naked and blue. Sometimes she only cups his face and looks at him with those blue eyes and says “I love you,” and he wakes with tears on his cheek. It is too much. He pushes them back like nightmares. 

He comes into the office and she’s wearing black, head-to-toe like a funeral. She’s cold and quiet and he thinks she doesn’t know where he goes sometimes when he sneaks away, thinks she doesn’t know how utterly alone he thinks himself.

She knows.


	3. What You Want

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this version of events, “Field Trip” takes place before “The Unnatural.”

 

She was not in her motel room, not in the lobby checking out, not in the coffee shop across the street. He dialed her cell four times, five, six, but she wouldn’t answer. The ringing was clipped short each time, somewhere around the second ring, sending him to her voicemail box. He wondered briefly if they would fail to earn their Team Builders certificate for skipping this afternoon’s session. He imagined they would more likely fail because they were disastrous as a team these days.

Rather than pace the narrow path around the bed in his room, or wait pathetically outside her door with his notebook and his best apologetic face (two options he considered briefly), Mulder decided to swim. He would burn off the sense that they were approaching some terrible precipice, or worse, some dispassionate, polite goodbye that would signal their anti-climactic end. There was a pool around the back of the hotel and Mulder imagined swimming laps until his shoulders burned and his lungs fought for air, until he could stop imagining her, changed back into her black suit, shaking his hand without any real regret, the staccato clicks of her heels as she walked away from him forever. In swim trunks and flip-flops, he pushed through the back of the lobby to the pool area, hoping it were relatively empty.

And there she was.

She sat at the other end of the pool, in the shade of a patio umbrella, changed now into shorts over a one-piece suit, hair pulled away from her face. Her sunglasses kept him from knowing her line of sight, but he didn’t think she’d spotted him—she was reading, feet propped on an adjacent chair. She looked… calm. She looked like a woman on vacation.

There were a handful of families in the enclosed area, some kids in the pool splashing at each other, and he was careful to avoid their wild spray as he crossed toward her. He moved into the shade of her umbrella, where she startled when she noticed him. He offered an awkward smile, glad he’d thought to put on a shirt before leaving his room.

“Can I sit?” he asked.

She pressed a pencil between the pages of her book and closed it, moved her feet from the chair. She was frowning, but she gave a little nod. “Okay.”

“I tried to call.”

“I know.”

He lowered himself to the seat where her feet had been. She watched him through her dark glasses. The freckles on her nose stood out under no makeup, and the tips of her hair were still stringy-wet.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She breathed, heavy and measured for a moment, thinking. “Sorry for what?” she said at last.

He watched her unreadable expression for some clue, but it was impossible. This was some kind of test and he was about to absolutely fail. “Scully…”

“Mulder.”

“Scully, I’m sorry I fucked up the writing exercise. I didn’t think it was that important.”

She sighed, and her posture slumped. One foot came up onto her chair, knee to her chest like a shield. He’d given the wrong answer, he supposed. “It’s fine,” she said.

“It’s not fine,” he countered. “What you said before—why did you ask me that, Scully? I know things have been off lately, but why would you ask if I still wanted to be your partner?”

She turned her head and her profile caught the afternoon light, sharp and uncompromising. At the perimeter of her glasses he saw the furrow of her brow. “We’ve always worked well together,” she began. “Our solve rate has been good. We strike a certain balance.” She turned back and her gaze fell to her toes, which gripped the edge of the metal patio chair, pink and unpainted. “And we were friends, I thought. More than that, maybe, because partnership entails more.”

He was beginning to worry. Her voice was too calm, too flat: a verbal bulwark emerging from this foreign creature in tan shorts and a lavender bathing suit. He wanted to touch her hand, but she held them both close, wrapped tight around her upright calf. “Of course we’re friends, Scully,” was all he could say.

She was shaking her head. “I don’t know, Mulder, I—” she swallowed. “I care about you. I think you care about me, at least as a partner. There have been times I thought maybe it was more personal than that.” His hand on her back: a bench in rural Pennsylvania; his  _oh, Scully_  at the drip of blood landing on a case report; a kiss to her knuckles:  _say a few Hail Mulders for me_  while he watched her with those droopy-sad eyes. And of course, those hours of sweet and desperate lost time in Antarctica. “But I don’t know if that’s true anymore,” she said. “And the work… I don’t feel like you see my work as valuable. I’m not sure you even see it at all.”

He watched her face, her nose reddening, her eyes still hidden away from him. He remembered her voice in his apartment, her wet, tired eyes:  _You don’t need me, Mulder. You never have. I’ve just held you back._  And so soon after, his own voice, frustrated, exhausted, beaten down:  _I’m sorry, Scully, but this time your science is wrong… And yet you still refuse to believe my theory… Who turns out to be right, like 98.9% of the time?_

Fuck.

“Mulder, I’ve lost everything else. I don’t want to lose this, too. But when you can’t even say what you appreciate, I…” her throat had closed off and she couldn’t finish.

“But I can! I did, Scully. I wrote it all down. I’ll give it to you.” He leaned forward and pulled her hands from around her knee, held them in his—but even as he wrapped his fingers around hers, he could feel her slipping farther away.

“You think I don’t believe you,” she said. “Which somehow means you think I don’t trust you. Or that you can’t trust me, that I’m not on your side. When I disagree, you treat me like an enemy.” She pulled her hands back, tucked them in her lap and shook her head. “It’s been a hard year.”

“I want you as my partner,” he said, because it was the one thing he knew was true. He needed her with him. He was a mess without her. She gave a small nod, then slowly, stood to collect her towel and book, pushed her feet back into her sandals.

“The water’s nice,” she said. “You should go for a swim.”

“Scully—”

“Mulder, think about it. Is it really me that you want? Or are you just afraid that if I leave, you’ll have failed somehow?” She put a hand on his shoulder, to let him know she wasn’t being unkind. And then, softer, “You need to think about what you really want… and who you want with you. If it’s me…” She shook her head. “Then we’ll need to talk more. Because it can’t be like this.” With that, she turned and walked away from him, back past the pool where there were more kids now, screaming and splashing and dunking and crying  _Marco!_  across the water, waiting for answering calls.

He saw her, then, as she hadn’t let him for so long: she was not only hard edges, sharp heels, a scalpel blade, the razor of science. She was also a frail human thing, just as he was. She was warm tea and soft pajamas, novel-reading at bedtime; she was laughing in the rain, smiling at his stupid jokes to humor him (because, for whatever reason, she  _liked_  him); she was his legitimating force and she rendered him human (she  _did_  keep him honest, did make him whole), but he had wielded her like a tool, like his very own investigative instrument. She was a woman who grieved her sister and her father like he did; she was her quirky love of expensive pens and her obsession with micronutrients and her love of dogs and children. She was a woman who deserved to be loved, but he’d hurt her because he was afraid to be the one that did the loving.

She disappeared into the motel, and Mulder’s head fell into his empty, empty hands.

—

Scully made it back into the room with her dignity, but only barely. She dropped her things to the small table, shut the door, and fell back against it, pulling her sunglasses from her face so she could bury it in her hands. Back pressed to the door, she let her legs do as they would, which was to go limp and slide out from under her. In an artless pile, she folded herself and wept—a silent shaking of the shoulders, an ugly crumple of her chin and lips.

Here was the room where she thought  _it’s over_. Here was the shitty nowhere town where she finally demanded he look at her, and fell apart when he still wouldn’t see.

She told herself it were only a momentary weakness. She would indulge it no longer than a handful of heavy, choking breaths before she climbed upright and stripped off her still-damp swimsuit. In the shower she would scrub herself clean of this. 

Her hands shook as she reached for the shampoo. She willed them steady. She had said what she needed to. She would leave him to think.

But there were still so many things they hadn’t said, so many tight knots of emotion and weakness and betrayal and furtive release, knots wrapped in words like  _Diana_  and  _Antarctica_. He might not choose her, but she would not let him hang himself in the arms,  _with_  the arms, of the real traitor. She would not let him be seduced or manipulated into believing wrong was right, even if it meant she had to leave him to make him listen. Even if it meant never bringing up those hours at the bottom of the world, those moments when she’d been sure he was choosing her, making real and material what he’d said before she’d fallen to his hallway floor. They were moments she couldn’t erase, no matter how hard he pretended they hadn’t happened.

Exhausted, Scully didn’t bother dressing beyond her pajama top and underwear. She flopped onto the bed, felt the cool puffs from the chugging air conditioner, the damp spot growing on her pillow under her head. She thought of his arms in a t-shirt, the way his long toes looked in flip flops–things she hadn’t allowed herself to really look at while they talked. She stared at the textured popcorn ceiling, and though she told herself not to, she found her hands slipping down between her legs. She told herself  _no_. She told herself  _it will only hurt to remember_ , but there was already so much hurt today–she at least deserved to feel something good: an ephemeral pulse of pleasure and shame, better than only shame. In the room were only the sounds of sheets rustling, a few brief gasps, and then she was asleep.

She didn’t hear the soft knock, didn’t see the folded slips of paper pushed under the door.

—

**Autumn, 1998**

He is lost at sea in ways both metaphorical and literal. There is something sprightly in the air that makes him wonder if it is all a dream, that bolsters his courage and makes him laugh at Nazis. The feeling is a kind of antithesis to those moments on the ice, at McMurdo, when the world was so dense and dark, he felt as though he’d been swallowed by time. Now he sits outside of it, not trapped below the sheen of reality, but hovering at its edges. He is made bold by the spectral energy and so he grabs her, kisses her as he would were the world not as it was. He is used to kissing her in his dreams, but this feels material, some liminal truth at the edges of here-now, and he can taste her. She tastes the same as she did before–that other time.

The liminality persists into his hospital room where his real Scully looks overcome with relief to see him. He thinks,  _perhaps I haven’t pushed her away_. He forgets about the things he’s said. His guilt is worn dull by near-death and meperidine, and his boldness lasts beyond the fairy dream-kiss. He taps her hip and thanks her for saving the world, but what he means is  _thank you for saving me thank you for staying with me thank you for believing in me_. It is the only way he knows how to say it, until the surge of confession draws her back to him and he says, “I love you,” like it is the triumphant answer to a riddle.

He knows she cannot say it back. He knows her armor is like iron and that it covers a wound he put there. But he smiles when he feels the bruise she gave him in return for his boldness, that other Scully of dreams and red dresses and kisses at the edge of time.

Later, his shame returns and he tells himself he didn’t mean it, that she knows he didn’t mean it. He runs: from complacency in their new assignment, from love, from himself. He runs to New Mexico to prove he is still committed to this thing. She rides along beside him, but in the end it amounts to nothing.

At home he finds his apartment changed and he thinks,  _Diana?_  He calls, but she denies it, then invites herself over to see. She sees it all. He sees it too, in the mirror above his bed. Shame and regret oscillate through him stronger than the throb of his orgasm and he knows it wasn’t worth it. Swears he won’t do it again.

—

**December 28, 1998**

For a small fraction of time, Scully begins to hope. She smiles at the memory of their gift exchange, of the sleepy heap they’d made on his couch, limbs entangled under a blanket until it was time for her to go. Work is slow and he has wandered off somewhere. She thinks she’ll find him and ask him to lunch, try to breach further the strange wall that has grown between them.

She pokes around the mostly empty Hoover building, quiet now in the lull of the holidays. She checks where she knows to look and finds nothing. A ripple in her guts: the basement office, then, she thinks. Perhaps. She hopes not. She hasn’t checked there. She marshals the courage, tries to quiet her heels as she moves between shelves on her way to the door that used to be theirs—but it is locked. Relief tingles in her fingers.

She turns to head back and that’s when she hears it: two voices. Arguing? Clipped words and then a groan—angry? She takes a few more steps toward the storage closet where it is dark and smells of Simple Green. She sees a back: his suit. She almost says “Mul-“ but stops herself in time. His pants are too loose, his hips moving strangely. A bare leg comes up along his hip and Scully swallows a burning coal. She hears a word and it stabs her everywhere, tingles her scalp, lights her cheeks aflame and burns her from the inside out.

She hears the word  _Fox_.

She turns then, eyes squeezed shut against the overhead lights that now seem too bright; her insides are fire and ice at once, rolled into some impossible, contradictory element. For a moment she cannot move. Her ears feel hot. The hallway wavers and dips. She breathes but it sounds loud and ragged—too loud. They will hear, she thinks.  _Move_ , she tells herself. And she walks on the balls of her feet to the elevator.

She leaves a note on his desk—a handful of words.

She goes home.

 


	4. Communication

Mulder did not, after all, go for a swim. He sat and watched the pool until the angle of the sun purpled the sky and the mosquitos embarked on their quest for blood. He was thinking about what he really wanted; she told him to think about what he really wanted. In all the world, after all these years, at the end of the path, among all other spatio-temporal clichés, what he really wanted… he’d never even let himself consider. His sister, of course. Answers, of course, about the depths of the lies and their continuing extent—how far their tentacles reached and what he could do to stop them. Answers to what had been done to Scully. And, of course, he wanted her with him. He wanted her. With him.

Somewhere inside him he hid a lockbox of truths too secret to bear. One was that he thought Samantha was probably dead. The other… the other was his love for Scully, the thing that rattled the air-tight cage and screamed to get out.  _Just partners, just friends_ , he said to it.  _Just partners, just friends_. Soothing words to calm the beast. And yet it howled.

He had not even let himself consider the damage he was doing to her by holding her at arm’s length. But her eyes today, in that seminar room, when he let her down with his answers, they haunted him now. And her red nose beneath her glasses at the pool. This beautiful creature had given so much of herself, had worked so hard, had only wanted to be seen, had let him  _touch her_ for christ’s sake—and what had he done?

Bug-bitten and overwarm from the afternoon sun, he returned to his room where he scrounged a pen and paper. He would think on the page:  _Dear Scully_.

Dear Scully, when you talk about leaving I feel physical pain. Dear Scully, I’m sorry you’ve had to work so hard to protect yourself from me. Dear Scully, I love you so much I’m afraid it will destroy you. Dear Scully, I’m sorry for ruining your life. Dear Scully please love me anyway.

He did not write these things. They were too fragile and true. But he tried. He made loose approximations with the words he had.

Heartsick, terrified, with shaky hands, he folded his note inside the questionnaire from the morning, torn from its booklet and scribbled all over with his desperate revisional confessions and apologies. When she did not answer his soft knock, he slipped the pages beneath her door and returned to his own room, where he waited and waited. With the sound turned down, he stared at the television, unseeing, for hours.

—

She stood on a beach in moonlight, where the sound of the ocean beat a soothing rhythm. Sandals hung from the fingers of her left hand while the cold water washed over her toes. In rolled-up jeans and a sweater, she held his folded note against her hip. 

The last line said, “There’s a campfire on the beach at 9. Please come.”

So she had. The theme of the evening was “Communication,” which was a fitting coincidence. She had come to hear him out.

Behind her, the voices of the other teams mingled into friendly white noise, buoyed by the melody of someone’s guitar. She listened as she waited for him to find her, standing separate, watching the dark tide. And then she felt his fingers brush the back of her arm. She turned, already alight with the electric buzz of anxiety that bordered on dread.

“Hey,” he said, dropping his hand. He wore that sweater again, that oatmeal henley that made her want to run her fingers across the bumpy fabric of his chest.

“Hey.”

His eyes were hooded, exhausted maybe, and she heard the nerves in his voice. “You got my note.”

She tapped the corner of the folded paper with her index finger. “I did.”

“You read it all?” he asked.

Of course she had read it all. She’d read it fifteen times. Nearly memorized it.  _Dear Scully, I can’t even imagine what you must be thinking…_  “Yeah,” she said, voice raw.

Wind whipped his hair out of place. A wave crashed around his boots, her bare feet. She shivered, and he touched her elbow to guide her up away from the water. “I meant those things, Scully. It was hard to write them down, but I know I owe them to you. After everything.”

_(I’ve been so lost…)_

She sighed. “Did you mean them only because you thought I might leave?”

_(I couldn’t even see myself, let alone you, and I know that’s no excuse…)_

Wounded. That’s how he looked.  _Good_ , she thought. “Scully…” He ran a hand over his face in frustration. “I’m trying.”

_(If I you weren’t with me, I don’t know what I’d do…)_

She nodded. “I know you are, Mulder.”

_(I need you. You’re the only partner I ever want in my life…)_

He’d said he was lost, and he looked it now. She could see he thought he’d been so brave with his note. Heroic, even, in confessing these things. “I wanted you to know,” he said.

_(I wouldn’t even let myself think it before. I couldn’t. But I love you.)_

She sighed, worrying the note between her fingers before stuffing it into her back pocket. “I appreciate it, Mulder. I really do. I’m glad you were able to write those things down. It’s good.”

He could sense her hesitation. “But?”

“But it takes more than a note, Mulder. If what you said is true… it takes more than a note to make them feel true.”

He raised his hand and carefully, so gently, cupped her cheek with his palm. “It’s not just a note. I’ll say it, Scully. I love you. I love you I love you. You’re the best thing I’ve ever known, and I need you with me.” 

She watched him watching her, wanted to believe him so badly. He was so good at this part, the keeping her with him part. His fingers on her face were warm, perfect, his skin on hers at last. They were everything. He leaned forward, just slightly, and when she didn’t push him back, he bent to kiss her, mouth salty with the sea air and she couldn’t help it, she kissed him back. His lips were like silk, a perfect slip against hers, full, hot like she remembered. And when his tongue touched her bottom lip, she opened for him. She fell into the kiss, was falling, was consumed with a blinding, red-hot need that she’d thought she left behind eight months ago. His other hand came to her waist, held her steady. She leaned into him, felt the hard length of him against her soft belly. She could taste his urgency, feel it in her bones, stretched through her sinew, and God how she wanted him back. It took everything in her not to give way. 

But it was not right–not this, not yet. She reached her hand up to the scruff of his cheek and pushed gently, separating them. Her head came back. She looked into his dark eyes, her own watering with want and terrible restraint.

“No,” she said, thumb against his bottom lip, still wet with her own saliva. “I can’t.”

“Why?”

“They’re just words, Mulder.” She took a deep breath, trying to pull herself back together, to unfeel the desire and the hope and the inevitable love that all moved through her like water. “You always feed me words. But words aren’t love, not really. You say things to me, like those things in your hallway, and they sound like love. Then you risk everything to save me, and I think you must mean them. And then we…”

She remembered the feel of her breasts pressed into his hands, the arch of her back under his touch, his mouth on hers hot and frenzied. The sense of being alone in a world where only the two of them mattered–he made her feel that, then.

“It was good, wasn’t it?” she asked.

The look on his face said he remembered, too. “Yeah,” he said, like warm gravel. “It was good.” His fingers twitched to touch her, but he held back.

“I thought it meant… something more. But then you pushed me away,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, Mulder, what did I do that was so wrong? Did you regret it so much? Resent me for letting it happen?”

“No!” He shook his head. “Scully, I don’t regret it.” Anguish on his face furrowed his brow, reflected his agony. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want these things said. 

But she was going to say them anyway. It was now or never, and they were going to  _talk_ , goddamnit.

“Did you change your mind about all those other things you’d said, then? You told me you couldn’t trust me, Mulder! You said you wouldn’t accept my work. You wouldn’t believe me. You said I was  _making it personal_.” At this last sentence, her voice almost broke. She held on to her composure, a fragile tendon threatening to tear, to snap. She was trying to breathe, but her heart, it hurt so much. Her fingers felt numb, so she squeezed them together, pinching her knuckles until they hurt, but it wasn’t enough.

“No, I… I meant them all.” His voice, lower, his index finger snuck out to touch her wrist. “I loved you the whole time.”

She was shaking her head, remembering—those phone calls, him slipping away, that leg across his hip. Her eyes were wet, and an ache so deep she thought it might be in her spine settled into her. “Then why did you do it, Mulder?” she whispered.

His eyes held that wounded look again. So earnest. “Do what, Scully?”

Finally, a tear got away from her. She clenched her jaw, steeled herself. “I know you’ve been with her. That you have been this whole time.” She shook her head again and there were more tears now, growing angrier the more she made herself remember. She wished she hadn’t let him kiss her. 

“I saw you,” she said, and forced herself to look at him.

He was a deer in the headlights. His skin was gray as the sand. “You did?” he croaked.

“In the storage closet.” She swallowed hard. “And you weren’t going to tell me.” Her anger was building, compounding with the weight of so many months of frustration and hurt. “You  _fucked_  her, Mulder, while I was three floors up and waiting for you. How many times? How often? Since when? Before Antarctica? And you  _wanted me to believe we were fine_.” A small sob choked free, a wild thing that could not be contained.

“I wanted to tell you,” he moaned, but she didn’t believe him. His face was in his hands, fingers at his temples. “I would have, Scully.”

“Do you even know, Mulder? Do you know how much you hurt me?” Her face, crumpling like tissue paper, tears hot and wet on her face. Then her voice, soft: “How can you say you love me? How can you say that when you were with her this whole time?”

“I couldn’t—I didn’t—” the words wouldn’t come. “Fuck, Scully. It wasn’t like that. I don’t love her. I stopped it! I haven’t… I told her no.”

“When?”

“After El Rico,” he says, and all she can think was  _after_ : counting days, trying to guess when. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Her look, glacier cold, “Well, I did.”

Scully’s face was stone, but her heart was breaking. It was cracking apart, leaking hot into her ribcage, burning her, even as her exterior cooled. There were wails inside her that wanted to get out, but she clamped them down with all the force of her need for self-preservation. All she had left was herself, and she couldn’t let that slip here.

“I do love you,” he said, as if it could fix this.

“Then why did you hurt me?” Her gaze, so earnest, her wound out in the open, heart spread out all over the sand between them.

“Because it’s what I do,” he said. “I’ve never known a love that wasn’t also hurt.”

His face when he spoke was misery, and God, she suddenly wanted to touch him again.  Because she knew. She knew it was only part of who he was, this fumbling and failing at love, that he’d been broken also. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she needed to make him understand.

She let herself touch his hand, and he gripped it tight, like the last lifeline on a sinking ship. “It hurt, Mulder, because of how I feel for you. Because I… it felt like you chose her instead—someone who would hurt you, instead of me.” She brushed her thumb over the back of his hand.

“Masochistic tendencies,” he said, and there was something like a smile on his lips that was really more a grimace.

“I wouldn’t have hurt you, Mulder,” she said, voice small. “I wouldn’t lie. I wouldn’t tell you what you want to hear to get what I want…” She pauses a moment, to find his eyes with hers, to tell him this thing she’s so needed to say. “But I won’t let you keep hurting me either. I’m not your sidekick or your employee. I believe in you, Mulder. I trust you. But that doesn’t mean I owe you blind agreement. That’s not why I’m here.”

“I know,” he said. “I know, I know, I know. I’m so sorry.”

“I need more than empty words in times of crisis. I need more than grand gestures. Or if that’s not something you’re capable of… I need you to tell me. And to let me go.”

He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Then what can you do?” she asked. It was an invitation, not a rebuke.  _Please_ , it said. Please show me it’s okay to love you. She gave him one last look and then turned and walked away.

—

**February 17, 1999  
Alexandria, VA**

Diana finds him after the meeting with Kersch, after the massacre at El Rico, after she managed to save herself and not the others: the families. She knocks on his door. He expects it to be Scully, maybe, finally, with fight back in her eyes. Maybe ready to tell him off like he deserves.

“Oh,” he says when he sees.

“Can I come in?”

He opens the door wider and she walks in like she owns the place, like she owns  _him_. She seems frustrated. “Well, you got the X-Files back.”

He closes the door behind her, crosses his arms over his chest. “We did.”

“You know I didn’t know what would happen. No one knew.”

He shakes his head. Scully knew. Not about the fire, but that sacrificing your soul wasn’t the way to save those you loved. She’d always known. “Diana, you can’t walk with the devil and expect not to get burned. Even if there hadn’t been a rebellion… it was the wrong decision.”

“So what’s the right one, then? Sit back and pretend like nothing’s happening? Bury your head in hunts for bigfoot and small-town mutants? This project is the future, Fox.” She steps toward him, puts her hand on his shoulder. “We can still fight this fight together.”

“ _Scully_  is my partner, Diana.”

Her hand moves to his neck, touches the fine hair behind his ear. “I’m more than your partner. I know you, Fox. She’s not committed to the work like you are. Like I am.”

He feels dizzy, confused, overwhelmed. He thinks of Scully: standing up for his work, defending him when no one else would, even shooting him to protect him, holding Skinner at gunpoint for him, grinning at his hospital bed after rescuing him from arctic death (they are even in that way, now). He thinks of her in a hospital bed with cancer, the empty screen of her face while she holds a dying child—glassy eyed and made of steel, hardened by the things done to her. Scully who has never, ever lied to him, never betrayed her sense of justice. He looks at Diana again, this tall seductress who leads him with bolstering words about his role in the future, who has known about women with cancer and doomed children and junk DNA and done nothing.

“She is not a pawn in this game,” he says.

“She’s not a player either,” Diana whispers, and she is moving closer, is pulling his face toward hers, and he almost lets her do it—almost lets her make him feel powerful again. But then he lets himself see what she’s doing: feeding him false assurances about his entitlement to a place on the field—by birthright, by careful positioning, by his proximity to powerful men. And so he stops her.

“No,” he says. “She’s not.” He pushes her back from him, turns and paces, hand coming to cover his mouth, mind racing. How blind, he thinks. How blind he’s been. How stupid not to see. “Neither am I,” he realizes. “I’m not some key player, and I won’t be made one.”

He stops moving to look at her, at the surprise on her face. “You need to go now,” he says. He crosses to open the door.

“Fox, come on—”

But he cuts her off with a shake of his head. “No. Please go. And please don’t come back.”

She gives him one last look, long and contemplative. “It may be your last chance,” she says.

“Good,” he says, and he closes the door.


	5. Trust

A little after eight in the morning, he stood in front of her motel door, holding coffee and a bagged-breakfast, knocking gently with his boot. It took her a minute, but she appeared, wet-haired, in jeans and a black v-neck.

“Mulder,” she said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

He held up the coffee and brown paper bag in explanation, little smirk on his face, nervous. “The motel breakfast is pretty bad, so…” He scraped his boot on the concrete. “Can I come in?”

She gave him a look, squint-eyed, like  _what are you up to_. She blinked, then stepped back. “Okay.”

In her room he set their breakfast on the table—her coffee done right, a strawberry croissant, her favorite. “This one’s yours,” he said.

The Florida sun was just warming the early day, grazing the window blinds to stripe the table where they sat. She sipped her coffee and it was good: two creams, no sugar.

“We’re gonna go to the thing today, okay? We’re gonna do it right.”

“We are?”

“Yeah.” He said, looking at her with all seriousness.

She eyed him, unsure. He was chewing his own croissant. “Why?” she asked. “You don’t really want to.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to listen to some corporate smile-guy telling me to assess my strengths and weaknesses, telling us to align our synergy, or to learn how to build consensus, or any of that bullshit. But we’re off the clock here, pretty much. The world isn’t ending. We’re here together, the sky is blue, there are no monsters in sight, and there’s a nature hike later today. Let’s just… be people. Okay? See if we can?”

She pursed her lips, watched him try to wrangle that obsessive energy and turn it toward whatever this was, hovering between them. He was twitchy. Anxious, she saw, like he’d spent all night working up the courage for this.

“Okay,” she said after pause. But she kept wariness and suspicion in her back pocket. Like a child who’d been bitten by a dog, she was reluctant to stretch her fingers out toward it again.

He surprised her, then, by touching her hair, her cheek, by leaning forward. “I won’t lose you,” he said. “I won’t.”

She just nodded and kept her eyes on the table.

—

At some point, Mulder realized, his self-indulgent pity had become his last refuge and comfort. In his room he’d sat with the taste of her still on his lips, half-hard from the remembered feel of her pressed to him, and thought how he’d do just about anything to have a chance with her again. To have her trust him again. He’d hurt her, though he’d not known how much until tonight. Self-flagellation had felt good: fucking Diana out of anger and the narcissistic desire to hear someone, anyone, say  _I believe you_  in that way, holding Scully away from him in self-denial. Except that it wasn’t himself he was hurting anymore. Hadn’t ever been, really. He’d thought he was punishing himself for failing, for losing the X-Files again, for never  _ever_  having the right kind of proof… But the whole time, every minute of his selfish, senseless behavior, he’d really been hurting  _her_. And for that… Christ, what a fucking piece of work he was.

The way he saw it, there were two ways forward. He could continue his unsuccessful campaign of denying, hating, and torturing himself over what an asshole he’d been… or he could  _do_  something about it and try loving someone for once in his miserable life, no matter how vulnerable it made him feel.

He’d looked at himself in the mirror. He’d actually stood in the motel bathroom and stared at his own pathetic mug and told himself to grow the fuck up right here and now because she wasn’t going to put up with any more of his bullshit. That stupid thing he’d written down this morning when he was being flip? That thoughtless answer he’d given to what he appreciated about her? Wrong. She doesn’t put up with it, and she won’t, and she shouldn’t have to. He looked himself in the eyes and thought,  _for whatever reason, she actually cares about you, and this is your last godforsaken chance at something good in this life and you are_ NOT _going to fuck it up_.

Then he forced himself to get six full hours of sleep, took a shower, and went to buy her breakfast.

—

When she’d finished her coffee, after sitting there without words, listening to her own breathing, she’d looked up at him and said “Okay,” a second time, and then, “Thank you for breakfast.” And there, on her scrubbed and freckled face, he saw the smallest trace of something that gave him hope.

Now they sat back-to-back on an ugly carpet with a bunch of other saps, doing something called a “blind-drawing exercise.” She was saying words that made little sense—directing him to draw shapes on a page that would add up to a picture, and he was fumbling to comply.

“Okay, now draw a triangle coming out from the midpoint of the long arc.”

“Like touching it?”

“Yeah, so the arc forms the shortest side and the farthest angle is acute.”

He bit his lip, concentrating. “Um, okay. I think I’ve got it.”

“Now a smaller arc that’s more of a circle, coming off the longer one at the left end, but make it kind of bulbus.”

“Scully, what the hell are you having me draw?”

She laughed, and her head fell back to touch his shoulder.

“No peaking,” he said.

“You either.”

And for the first time in what felt like months, they were both laughing, and yes, yes, she left her head there on his shoulder, and it made his heart pound and his hand shake. He could hear the smile in her voice as she told him things like “now a small black circle” or “another very small triangle, about a third the size of the bulb shape” and eventually, he had drawn something that almost made sense.

“Hey, is it a bird?”

“Mulder! Did you cheat?”

“No! Look!” and he turned around and showed her and she was laughing at his terrible bird, but he was right, he’d done it right, and it was a small but beautiful triumph.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said, still smiling. “Can I borrow your pencil?”

When she turned around again to draw, balancing her booklet on her knees, she let her back fall against his and kept it there, the heat of their bodies meeting at a single point. He tried to concentrate and describe the basic shape of a tractor (“A big circle and a little circle… some rectangles”), but couldn’t stop thinking that he was, maybe, for once, getting something kind of right.

There was a peace settling between them, a quiet presence like a low hum. Familiar. He recognized its gentle whir, remembered hearing it first rising in a damp motel room in Oregon, thought of its electric buzz at dozens of hospital bedsides, or its low-cycling resonance on late-night couches where they sat shoulder-to-shoulder. It was the sound of them, he thought. It was the sound of whatever this was that they’d forged together and almost lost. It was their trust, most of all.

—

In the woods again, no mothmen. No life-draining bugs. Just a compass for one and a map for the other.

“Hey, Indian Guide, which way is west?”

He held the compass flat: studied, turned, and pointed. They hiked.

A blue bandana held her hair back and dirt smudged her nose. He wanted to wipe it, kiss it off. Wanted to back her up against a tree and show her just how grateful he was for this second chance. He settled for supporting her arm as she scaled a tricky pass, for brushing his hand against her back while he held up a thin branch of prickles for her to pass under. She didn’t tell him no, didn’t glare. He tucked these moments away in his mind as small victories.

Then, on a steep slope, his foot slipped and he fell back against her, almost knocked her down, but she held him, held steady. “Whoa,” she said. “You okay?”

“I got it,” he said, grabbing a nearby branch for balance. He stilled—they both did, and her hand remained longer than it needed to, pressed warm to his chest. Her face was almost level with his on the incline, and they were suddenly just… looking. Lost in each other’s curious gaze, two people suddenly face-to-face with each other. His own hand, he realized, was on her hip, fingers curling at the waistband of her jeans. The air grew thick around and between them, but Florida humidity it was not. “Okay?” he asked, voiced pitched low, almost raspy, and she nodded, just a tiny dip of the head. His fingers tightened on her hip.

“Mulder,” she said.

His eyes fell closed and he clenched his jaw. “I know.”

“You trust me,” she said, a question in the form of a statement.

“You know I do.” Her fingers hadn’t moved, and his heart beat hard against her palm.

“I trust you with my life, Mulder. But not…”  _with my heart_ , she thought. Not yet. She watched his eyes and saw him understand.

“I can’t forgive myself, Scully. I won’t. And it’s so unfair for me to ask you to try.” His fingers again, their slightest movement at her waist—a thumb, just at the edge of her skin, like a match-head igniting her. “But I’m going to ask you to try. Let me show you that you can trust me.”

Emboldened with his words, two fingers joined his thumb at her hip. She let her palm slip in an almost-caress to wander past his collarbone, around the back of his neck. He was sweaty there, from the hike and the Florida warmth, and she was similarly damp, the weight of her pack pressing a line of sweat heavy to her shoulder. They were warmer here, of course, than they’d been in Antarctica, but no less alone in these woods, where the deep thrum of primal want began beating between them again. She yearned, suddenly, to lick the sweat clean from his jaw, to push him behind the thicket, into the rocks and dirt, and swallow him whole. She wanted to stamp him as  _hers_  and make him prove that he loved her. It was crazy. It was possessive madness, but she could tamp it down no less than she could her own blood beating.

“Scully.”

“Yeah,” she said, wondering how her voice got that way, so low, so heavy.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said, and she couldn’t have stopped him if she’d wanted to because her body moved on its own, her traitorous hips driving toward his in the green green of that forest. His mouth came down on hers like a hot iron and she was already pulling it closer, opening her lips and begging him with her tongue. She couldn’t help it. God, she couldn’t help it. She wanted him so much.

His left hand let go of the branch to hold her face, to massage his love into her cheek.  _Believe me_ , it said.  _Believe me, I love you_ , while the other hand had abandoned the world of fabric for more patches of soft skin. They shifted to angle their bodies closer until they were falling into each other, into the needy press of this elemental substance that drummed up from the earth and into their veins, their hearts, their skins.

And then they were  _really_  falling. A rock unmoored from its earthy clutch, and their feet went out from under them, slipping, crashing through the underbrush and thicket, sliding down the hill and tumbling into the leaves and dirt. Mulder grasped her to him, sheltering her from prickles and thorns until they came to a stop, filthy and laughing, gasping on the woodland floor.

“Oh, Mulder,” she said. “Are you okay?” She touched his head first, his face, his neck, from her position splayed across his torso. She pulled a leaf from his hair, but it was his arms that were scraped, three lines of deep red along his forearms, where the sticker bush had nabbed him.

“I’m fine,” he said, still smiling. He cupped her face. “You?”

She nodded. “Fine,” and seemed to realize how they were positioned. She looked down at their bodies, at their rumpled clothes, at their legs entangled, and blushed. Before she could comment, could gather her composure and set them rational and right again, a voice called out from several yards away.

“You guys okay?” it asked. “Jeez, we saw that fall! Do you need first aid?”

Not so alone as they’d thought, it turned out. “We’re okay!” Mulder called, then quieter, to her, “Time to get up.” But before Scully could climb off him, he tugged her down, quick, for a kiss. It was no chaste thing, but wet and hot with relief and the adrenaline-thrill of their brief misadventure. “I’ll show you,” he whispered at her ear when he’d let her lips go. “I’ll show you how much I love you.”

And then he was helping her up, brushing off, reaching for the compass in his back pocket, hoping it hadn’t been cracked. “This way.” He nodded back toward the path.

Dumbstruck, a little wobbly, she followed.


	6. Reciprocation

There were many things he loved about her, when he let himself think about it: the way she would stop and stretch and sigh in the middle of an autopsy; the fact that even her pajamas looked a bit formal and professional; how she couldn’t hide a blush; that look she gave him when she was trying to disagree, but he could tell she didn’t. His favorite, though, really his most favorite thing about her if he were being honest with himself and feeling just the right kind of way, was that she could fall asleep anywhere and did, regularly—uncomfortable hospital chairs, rental Ford Tauruses from every state in the Union, his couch nearly every time she sat down on it. And here she was again, after a long day, now in a mini-bus bringing them back to the conference motel: conked out with her head on his shoulder. He watched her sleep, smiling, just letting himself feel, and it was like little thunderclaps of realization, how much he loved her.

They’d passed the course, whatever that meant, and received, each, a little Kinko’s copy slip of paper: Team Builders™ certified. Skinner would be so proud. Tomorrow morning they would fly back to D.C., to normal life and to work, and to whatever would become of them.

For now, he lay his hand on her thigh, just above her knee, and watched her mouth slip open in sleep. He indulged a wild fantasy of waking beside that drowsy face, perhaps on a Sunday morning in his apartment. Perhaps naked. Would she bring those button-down pajamas in a little overnight bag? Would he undo the buttons one-by-one? It had been so long since he’d let himself imagine. The thunderclaps kept coming, little squeezes to his heart.

When the bus stopped, he brushed his knuckles to her cheek and whispered into her hair, “We’re here.” Her head shook in surprise as she came awake.

“Mulder?” And then she saw and remembered and said “Oh,” and rubbed her eyes.

He walked her to her door where he held out his hand, too formally, for her to shake. “Miss Scully,” he said. She was giving him that squinted look, her patented disapproval, but humored him with her hand in his. Instead of shaking it, he brought it to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “It’s been a pleasure building a team with you.”

She smirked and dug around in her bag for the room key, but he swore there was something pinker in her cheeks. “What time’s our flight?” she asked.

“8:05.” He watched her fiddle with the key card and push her door open. Evening bugs screeched into the humid night air.

“Meet me in the lobby at 6:30?”

He nodded, and was about to leave, when she turned and gave him a look.

“I—” then a pause. “Thank you,” she said. “For trying. For listening.”

He nodded again, solemn now. “You think we’ll be okay?”

She thought for a moment, shifting the weight of her pack and dropping it to the floor inside her room. “I think so,” she said. “But you need to promise me something.”

“Anything, Scully.”

She drew a breath before speaking, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. “Promise me you won’t use my… feelings for you… to get what you want from me. Not ever again.”

He frowned, a little unsure at first what she meant. Her feelings for him. Her commitment. Her goodness. Her love.  _You’re my one in five billion_ , he’d said strapped to a psych-ward bed, urgently needing her to listen.  _You make me a whole person_ , when he couldn’t bear for her to go away from him.  _You’re making it personal_ , when he’d picked up on her jealousy and refused to listen to what he didn’t want to hear. Each memory like a little knife in his gut: how he’d bent her to him and hurt her with the same careful (awful) words. How he deserved neither her strength, nor her forgiveness. Mulder eyed her now, so small in her jeans and boots, dirt still smudged on her nose. What an ass, what an ass he’d been. He shook his head. “Never. Never again. I promise.”

A little crease appeared between her eyebrows, on her chin. “I promise too, Mulder. I won’t stop challenging you. I won’t change who I am. But you need to know that I believe in you, that I’ll always stand with you. For us.” She reached a finger out to touch his chest, a gentle tap on his sternum. “Don’t doubt me,” she said. “I won’t ever give you reason to.”

He leaned in, raised his palm to her hair, and bent to kiss that little smudge of dirt on her nose. “I won’t,” he said. “I won’t doubt you again.”

Caught in the streetlamp glow of the motel parking lot, her eyes shined a bit too wet, and she pursed her lips to hold back the quivering of her chin. She was forgiving him, he thought, right there in that moment. They were making this right.

With one last brush of his fingers down the length of her arm, he said, “Good night, Scully.” Then he turned and walked toward his room, leaving her standing in the doorway with something a little like longing. Because he could show restraint, too. Because he wasn’t all grand gestures and love at full force or not at all. Because his way could be giving her what she asked for, and what she needed, which was a little more time.

—

Tuesday, at the Hoover building again, they walked together to a meeting with Skinner, where they’d hand over their certificates.

“Agents,” Skinner said.

Mulder’s hand touched her back on their way to sit and she breathed deeply. They could do this, she thought. They could be partners like they were before. Better partners, even, she told herself. This was normal. Everything was normal. She could feel the scrutiny, Skinner’s eyes on them both. What was he looking for?

“I trust your team building seminar went well, and that you managed to attend both days of activities?”

They both nodded, though she thought back to Saturday, to blowing off Mulder and the seminar, to swimming so she wouldn’t cry, to him finding her by the pool. To their conversation on the beach that had been just a bit more than conversation alone. Close enough, she decided.

“And you found the seminar helpful?”

Mulder and Scully glanced at each other, still a little uncomfortable. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“And you’ve brought some paperwork for your personnel files?”

They each passed a certificate over Skinner’s desk, which he took and studied for a moment before setting aside. “Good,” he said. Then he was staring at them, as if he could penetrate the opaque wall around their relationship. The moment lasted just a bit too long, and then he cleared his throat. “If you two aren’t working on an active case right now, Rockville P.D. has something I’d like you to consult on.” He slid a file across his desk, and Mulder leaned forward to pick it up. “Lead Detective’s name is Matthews. He’s expecting your call by the end of the day.”

Mulder opened the file and skimmed the first page.

“Is that all, sir?” Scully asked, squirming, just a bit, under the scrutiny.

“That’s all,” he said. “You can go.”

And just like that, they were back to work.

—

Here was an office where two people labored, day after day, in pursuit of truth and justice. Here was a desk and its chairs, one dragged around the side to rest beside the other, cramped, so the two could read together. Their heads were too close, hands touching over the file. Here is where he would place his hand on her back to remind her, to say with his fingers that he wouldn’t forget. Here is where she would trust him again, smile at him again, where she’d bring a nonfat Tofutti rice dreamsicle to work (on this  _gorgeous_ Saturday), and where she was sure he would kiss her under the skylight … until he ran off with stolen property and left her to frown in his absence.

But then there was his message, and she smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. Fox Mantle. His nervous voice, his grin when he saw her.  _Get over here, Scully_.

His fingers curled on her hip: he was showing her. He could be sweet. He could listen. He could show her the things that he loved, which were mostly her. They felt into their bones the smack of the bat: in their arms and their ribs, and his hip against her backside. She told him to shut up, but she didn’t mean it—she could listen to him talk in her ear like that all night. 

When the baseballs ran low, he sent the boy home. He dropped the bag full of balls in the dust of the catcher’s box, and he walked her backwards toward the chain-link fence, hands at her hips again. The light was dim, but her eyes were so blue, and she could still feel the vibration of the bat against the ball in her hands. So she brought them to his face to steady them, to ground herself, to lock her eyes on his and hold the two of them still as the world around them tilted. Her back hit the fence and it rattled and shook. She laughed—lower, softer than the giggle she’d offered over home plate.

“Did you like your present?” he asked.

“I did. Thank you.”

“Hmm,” he said, nodding. They were so close, her palm at his cheek, his hands at her waist, under her jacket. “Dana Scully.”

“Mm hmm,” she said, because it was all her voice could conjure.

“We worked all week,” he said. “And everything was fine.” Those fingers, tugging at the edge of her blouse, pulling it up, just a bit, so he could sneak his fingers under to touch her skin.

“Yeah.”

“And we helped solve a crime.”

“We did.”

“And you know what?”

“What?” she asked, letting her fingers move to his temples, touching the soft hair, her favorite thing to do. It was just a bit sweaty from their evening, and she loved it all the more.

“I still love you,” he said, and her heart did a double beat, her face flushing pink.

“You do?”

He nodded his head as he lowered it, bringing his lips down to hers. “I love you,” he murmured against her mouth, until her tongue came out to quiet his and they were really kissing, like they meant it, like they would not stop this time. He pulled her tight and her hip turned out to make room for his knee, and  _oh_ , that was nice. But they had to stop because this park was public, and they’d sent one child home but there could be others.

“Do you know what you want, now?” She asked, breathing heavy at his cheek.

He nodded, pressed his forehead against hers, their noses nearly brushing. “I do,” he said. “I want this.” He kissed her again. “I want to see you. Every day. For the rest of my life.”

“Just to see me?”

He smiled. “Well,” and his fingers crept higher beneath her shirt, gliding along her ribs, brushing just below the underwire of her bra. “Seeing probably won’t be quite enough.”

“Hmm,” she murmured when she felt his thumb slide along the satin underside of her breast.

“I’m a mess, Scully. I don’t deserve you at all. But I want you anyway, because I’m selfish and for whatever reason—I think—you seem to want me back.” At this, in answer, she arched against him, pressing her belly to his hips, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She did. She wanted him back. She loved him back. “I can’t promise that I won’t be an asshole sometimes, because I can’t always help it. I get obsessive and self-absorbed, and I forget to remember that I don’t deserve you and that you are the very best thing that I have. If I have you. When I have you.” Here he cupped her cheeks again and looked directly into her eyes. “But when that happens, Scully, you tell me. You tell me to come back to you and I will. Because I won’t ever lose you. I can’t.”

She couldn’t help it, her eyes were teary and she nodded, held his face in her hands as he held hers. “You have me, Mulder. You always have.”

—

So it happens this way. Somehow they make it back to their cars, though her buttons are askew and she feels too lust-drunk to drive. She follows him back to his apartment. Inside… inside they are barely through the door when he is kissing her again, pushing her up against his door-frame, sucking on her neck and she is groaning and arching into his hand that finds her breast.

He tells her she is beautiful. He tells her he’s never seen anything like it. He unbuttons her blouse: one, two, three, four, five, and her black satin is there before him. It steams hot under his mouth, and her nipples pebble taut. They have not even made it past the entryway.

“Mulder,” she says, hardly supporting her own weight, letting his arms around her back hold her up. “Take me to bed.”

So he scoops her up and she laughs into his neck, biting, kissing it better. He is so careful through the doorway and into the bedroom where he lays her down. He wants to see her. She tugs at his jersey. He twists on a lamp and she glows tungsten amber. “There you are,” he whispers.

She divests him of his jersey, buries her nose in his bare chest, purrs like a small cat at the smell of him. He is mad with want of her, but he wants it to be right. “Slow this time,” he says.

“In the light this time,” she says.

They are not strangers. They are not lost at the bottom of the world. They are here. When his fingers slip beneath her panties, he groans at how wet he finds her. “Scully,” he murmurs. This. Here. Her.

“Mulder,” she moans back. 

They are them.

He makes love to her slow—so tender. She arches and cries out, grips his hair, clutches his bicep. He fills her, and her eyes fill too, wet with how good it is, how much she’s wanted it.

“I love you,” she tells him at last. “I love you, I love you. I’ve always loved you.” And he loses himself right there, just for a moment, because he  _believes_  her. He’s not heard those words and believed them in so, so long.

So he kisses her harder and he tells her he loves her and… they come. They fly. They call out to each other, as if they are not bound, not one thing held together with the glue of years and grief and respect and lust and hours of looks and touches and talks. They are wholly themselves, clicked into place, the delicate interlocking puzzle of perfect opposites.

After, they watch each other with small smiles across pillow and down. He tucks hair behind her ear. She pulls at his shoulder until he rolls to lay atop her, head at her breasts, kissing. She laughs.

When they wake it is Sunday, and she is sleepy naked in his blankets. There is light and warmth. When he feels the fire of love in his belly, he does not swallow it down this time. He tells her, “Scully, I love you,” and the words bloom in the open.

Her lips turn up. She gathers his fingers in hers, brings his palm to her lips. Without sound, she tells him the same.

 

-END-


End file.
